all about audience research in museums and other cultural institutions

Friday, November 16, 2007

Evaluating online audiences

This question from Martin Bazley and Nicky Boyd, London via the Visitor Studies Group email alert: We are doing some research into online audiences for the London Museums Hub. Have you done any evaluation of your online audiences, or do you know of any other data or research? They also detail a range of other questions around audience and methodology.

Martin and Nicky, this is a really growing field of evaluation and we have been active in this area over the past year or so. As part of her internship here, Mel Broe did literature review of online audiences and evaluation which she posted here on my blog. I also posted about a study I did with teachers and students and the web which has a series of extra comments and links. I also presented a paper with some very initial work on digital audiences and museums to a bunch of interesting folks in Tubingen, Germany, just last week. I posted that paper on my wiki (go to the second one). I am developing this paper more as we do further research with online audiences aged 18-30 (which is being presented to us today) and teenagers (via an e-kids' college we are running here in two weeks time). I promise to blog about these projects further.

What is the audience research blog?

Hi everyone. I'm conducting a blogging experiment - will this blog become a way for those of us who work in museum evaluation and audience research to share our work with the world, rather than via email to our contacts as happens currently?

My challenge to you, my colleagues, is to use this blog to post questions, answer queries and share experiences. I look forward to this adventure with a mixed sense of excitement and anxiety!

Disclaimer: The views expressed on this blog are those of individual post authors and are not the official views of the Australian Museum, who accepts no liability for content posted on this site. This blog is moderated by Lynda Kelly with input from Mel Broe an intern from the University of Sydney.